ABSTRACT
This chapter will discuss the role of the probation officer and the probation services officer in court as ‘expert witnesses’ and their relationship with sentencers. The social inquiry or enquiry (there was never any logical reason for the different spellings) report was the traditional mechanism for the reconstruction of a criminal within professional discourse as a ‘treatable’ or ‘manageable’ offender. It symbolized individualized sentencing based on the positivistic (or humanistic) belief that an understanding of the offender's personal and social background and circumstances may contribute towards helping them to stop offending. The 1991 Criminal Justice Act replaced the social inquiry report with the pre-sentence report and this represented much more than a change of nomenclature. It represented an uncoupling of the relationship between crime and ‘the social’, locating it firmly in the realm of ‘the moral’, the main focus being individual intentionality, remorse, risk and capacity to respond to normalizing instruction.
